Mother/Daughter

It is not a time of New Year, new me. Nor is it a time of old year, old me. Since starting therapy I am almost perpetually in a state of transition. Maybe I am becoming myself. I don’t actually know. I haven’t met myself yet.

There is a lot of therapy homework this week. One of the things I have been tasked with is to think about the mother archetype and my relationship to it.

Over Christmas I read The Clearing by Samantha Clark (one of Amy Liptrot’s books of the year). In it, Clark writes about her relationship with her mother and father as she and her brothers clear the house that was their parents’. It was a book I savoured rather than devoured. There are so many elements of it that spoke to me, but this passage about her relationship with her mother seemed important here:

Mothers are inside daughters are inside mothers. I was born the day my mother was newborn, lodged as a tiny seed that grew inside her ovary as she grew inside her own mother, as my unborn daughters were born with me at my birth, an infinite regression of Russian dolls. My mother burns far away, like the ether beyond the moon. And my mother burns inside me, passes right through me like the ether wind, yet still I cannot find her, cannot measure her drift. Inside me lives an old fear, a gift from my mother, her legacy to me. But it is not a wound. It is not a fault to be fixed. It is an enrichment, the texture of my life, the last I have of her, the thing that we share, this fear that has no reason, needs none, fear that grinds along my bones and lodges just behind my throat, and turns over in me. As so many have looked for and failed to find the subtle ether, I’ve been looking for my mother, as if there might be something clean and straightforward under the sediment of sorrow and anger. Not the woman my brothers grieved, the woman they tell me was beautiful, vivacious, musical, loving, but the anxious, needy, over-medicated woman I knew. She is buried deep in me, lives in my body, this same body that was once inside hers, her body that lives on in mine, in the hands that look so much like hers, in the dark brown eyes and hair she gave me. I find her, close by my heart, here in the fear that lives in the crawlspace behind my ribs, when I wake at 4. A.m. with a mind ablaze, flickering with fast-edit images of vivid dreams…

I love that she writes so clearly about the complexity of her relationship with her mother. It is so primal and so strange. I realised, on reading it that I needed a new language to talk about my experience as a mother and a daughter. I am looking for the words that fit the complexities of my own relationships, not a yardstick or a set of rules that have, over the years become weighty and for me, rather dangerous.

In the therapy session, we talked about our experiences as mothers and as daughters. My therapist talked about changing her relationship with her mother towards the end of her life. She said something I have been thinking about in the days since our session. She said that it had been of immense value to her to step outside the confines of the mother daughter relationship and to choose to walk alongside her mother as a woman she had chosen to journey through life with.

My relationship with my mother is one that is inevitably and inextricably entangled with my relationship with my daughters. The image of Clark’s Russian dolls seems so powerful. This idea that we carry and are carried, nested inside each other, that we know each other as mother and daughter long before we are pushed into the world. This connection can be so profound, but perhaps also stifling for everyone concerned. I think sometimes that the bond can be so strong that it thrusts into shadow any attempts to be anything other than mother/daughter. It can be daunting to step outside of that for all kinds of reasons. I am beginning to think it is necessary though.

And then, of course there is the belief that as we age, the relationship between a mother and a daughter reverses. So often we hear of mothers who become children in their old age and daughters who become the parent. It seemed like an inevitability when I sat and thought about it, but not one that I wished for or looked forward to. It always seemed rather frightening and disempowering for all concerned. I didn’t have another narrative until now, but I much prefer the idea of two women, connected by a life of journeying together, walking side by side, helping each other as equals. I am far more interested in a sharing of power, a co-operative, rather than a dictatorship.

The mother archetype is a powerful one. It is celebrated as the root of creation, giving life to things, whether those things be children or the fruits of our labour in other ways. It is nurturing and rich in possibility but there are times when it can riot out of control. It can be a lot. And sometimes it can be too much.

I have had an uneasy relationship with being a mother. I love my children fiercely but I did not find being a mother as easy as I had imagined it would be. I wrestled for a long time with the absolute power of the mother within me and resented the squashing down of the Katyness of me. I worked hard at preserving a sense of self that wasn’t tied to my job as a mother, but there were times when I could feel myself disappearing. The darker aspects of the mother archetype seem very much tied into the idea of sacrifice. It can be easy to get lost in the liminal spaces between what a child actually needs and what mother guilt tells you, until one day you find yourself calling yourself ‘mum’ and wonder where the youness of you went.

Now that my children are almost grown, I am left to renegotiate the role anew. I like the idea of walking by their side, too. The care and love that exist between us can exist side by side just as well as it could with them nestled within me, especially now that they are much bigger than me. There are many ways it seems, to be a mother, just as there are many ways to be a daughter.

When my daughter Tilly was born, I was going through one of my intermittent periods of deep crisis. The birth had been traumatic. What had supposed to have been a tranquil, home birth ended up in an emergency trip to hospital and a stay of ten days, during which my beloved aunt died. When I emerged scarred, bereft and with a new life to care for, I didn’t do so well. I saw a grief counsellor, a wise and compassionate woman, who when I burst into tears at all my failures to be the mother I had imagined, reminded me that it was ok for me to be exactly the mother I was. Your child, she pointed out, hasn’t read any of the books and isn’t judging you. Your child, she said, loves you because of who you are to her and that’s all that matters.

Archetypes can be a source of inspiration and wisdom, but they can also become a prison. I worked very hard, back in the fierce parenting days, to keep the flame of myself alive. If I use it now to burn down the prison, I don’t think anyone I love will mind.